There’s a moment in every industry when a new technology crosses from genuinely useful to actively dangerous. For PR, that moment arrived not with a bang, but with a million simultaneously generated press releases, each one more fluent and less meaningful than the last.
People who have never spoken to a journalist, never sat in an editorial meeting, and never endured the particular humiliation of a pitch dismissed in four words are now producing releases at industrial scale, with the breezy confidence of someone who has just bought a piano and believes they can therefore play one.
Journalists are not laughing. Their inboxes have become archaeological digs, with real stories buried under thickening layers of polished, purposeless content. The word they use most often is “garbage,” which is blunt but not inaccurate. What arrives is grammatically impeccable and editorially worthless.
What many businesses never anticipate is the lasting cost of getting this wrong, and yes, journalists have very long memories. A brand that repeatedly fills an editor’s inbox with AI-generated noise does not simply miss out on coverage, it earns a reputation that is considerably harder to reverse than any single bad pitch. Being ignored is recoverable, but being remembered as a source of irrelevant garbage is not.
The trouble with giving everyone the tools of fluency is that fluency was never the hard part. The hard part is knowing what constitutes a story, why an angle works for one publication and not another, and why the same facts make a journalist lean forward or reach for delete. You cannot download that.
This is where respected PR agencies matter more in the AI age, not less. Journalists have always relied on a small pool of trusted contacts to pre-filter what is worth their attention, and when an agency with a proven track record sends a release, it carries an implicit editorial endorsement that the material has already passed a rigorous filter, which means the email gets opened and the pitch gets read. That mechanism does not become obsolete when AI makes production cheap. It becomes the only reliable signal in an inbox full of noise.
AI has made it trivially easy to produce communications and enormously difficult to be heard, because everyone else is producing communications too. In a landscape where anyone can generate content that reads as though a competent professional wrote it, the only differentiator is whether a competent professional was actually involved. Production is now free, and judgement is the only thing worth paying for.
The winners in this age are experienced practitioners who use AI and already had the judgement to deploy it well. The losers are everyone who thought PR was just writing, and every business that mistook volume for strategy. They are discovering, with varying degrees of grace, that it was always about producing understanding.
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